


Knowing How To Pick 'Em

by MercuryGray



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: 1930s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Poly, Background Relationships, Background Slash, Backstory, Bisexual Male Character, Blind Dates Original Characters Prompt, F/M, Great Depression, Multi, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Polyamory Negotiations, Poverty, Sex Work, With Apologies to John Steinbeck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:56:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29682216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: By the age of twenty-one, she's seen enough of fruit picking camps and Hoovervilles to know that's not the life she wants. There's a poster in town recruiting for Lady Marines, and she's not sure quite what that means, but anywhere's got to be better than here.Blind Dates OC Prompt, 2021
Relationships: Edward "Hillbilly" Jones/Original Female Character, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Knowing How To Pick 'Em

**Author's Note:**

> A few weeks ago for Valentine's Day, I started a little project with one of my Band of Brothers writing servers to conceptualize, name, and write a few hundred words for a new Original Character in a weekend. This was supposed to be a short snippet that introduces the character to the fandom property of your choice, and establishes them as a leading person worth paying attention to. (Bonus points were awarded if they played opposite to a canon character you don’t usually write. Blind dates for the muse, remember?) Anyway, on Sunday night after I was wrapping up some of the Blind Dates stuff other writers had submitted, I had another idea for a Pacific OFC and it got just a tiny bit spicy but I'm so pleased with the way this turned out and I wanted to share it.

The one thing she missed about home was the beer.

Melbourne held many attractions for visiting Americans, but the food, it had to be said, was not one of them - wartime rationing on a large island nation left little to be desired where dinner and drinks were concerned. She'd asked for a beer, and been served...whatever this was, a lady's pint that was not going to do nearly enough for her thirst - of that kind or any other.

Sergeant Marie Atcheson sat back in her chair and peered discreetly in the mirror behind the bar to check the angle of her cap - it was her first 48 hour pass in months and she meant to make something of it - which shouldn't have been hard, given that all the Marines from Guadalcanal had been unleashed on the unsuspecting streets of Melbourne, fresh from battle and most of them practically aching for a girl.

Well, if they wanted this one, they'd have to do a mite better than a song and a smile. She had her eye on a particularly broad-shouldered captain on the other side of the room with a movie star grin and the kind of brown hair a girl liked to run her hands through, not so far into his evening that he couldn’t give a girl a good time, and, even better, not already attached to anyone in a skirt.

Propositions didn’t make themselves - she scooted down from her chair and made her way casually over to the other side of the room. "Buy a girl a drink, marine?" Simple was better, sometimes, where these sorts of things were concerned.

But no sooner had he turned around, and she’d gotten a chance to see that his eyes were just as soft and brown as his hair, another man spoke. “Sergeant Atcheson, are you fixing to give the Skipper trouble?”

She knew that voice, and it made her smile, a little, despite the fix he was putting her in. "Might be, Sergeant Jones," she said, turning around to face the tall soldier with the curly chestnut hair and feeling a little heat under her skirt as she looked him over. Was it a year since she’d seen him in California, or had it really been longer than that? But you didn’t forget men like him easily. Thinner, now, and somehow keener, a man who’d seen some things and done some things he’d maybe like to forget. (She’d read about the ‘Canal, seen the pictures the public didn’t. She knew, a little, at least, of what they’d seen, what they’d done.) "Depends who's asking."

"It's  _ Lieutenant _ Jones, now," he said, offering his sleeve. “So you’d best behave, if you know what’s good for you.”

“Don’t I always?” she said, hardly holding back her grin. Oh, she knew Eddie Jones - _ knew _ him, too, if that's what you were getting at. Wasn't but four weeks at basic when he'd pulled her up short of clawing another girl's eyes out over the matter of a spilled drink. 

"What'd you do that for?" she said, outside in the alley, shaking his hand off his arm as soon as he'd let her loose. "I was winning."

"Winning's why," he said, all long limbs and loose-legged smiles. "Fighting like that'll get you out on your ass. Thought a smart girl like you would see that."

She sniffed. "I ain't smart." Smart was a word for people like Lieutenant McEwan, who'd done two years of college and didn't have to be told how to sit like a lady, not girls who'd barely finished high school and only had a fancy-sounding name because their ma had liked the sound of it.

"Smart enough to pick a fight you could win," he offered, the barest hint of a smile around his lips _.  _ (She’d learn later he wasn’t much for smiling, ever, and this was about as close as he got to a grin.) _ You sassing me, Sergeant _ , she wanted to ask, but he wasn't sassing, not really, at least not in a way she knew. And she could tell you she knew plenty, about men - hard not to, growing up in labor camps out in San Joaquin picking fruit until your fingers bled and you couldn't stand the smell of peaches. Not the taste - oh, she'd kill for the taste of a peach - but the smell. Because the smell was all you got, trying to get your twenty five bushels a day. Bread and butter for lunch, and the smell of peaches on your skin till kingdom come.

You'd come home at night to help your ma get water for the washing up and meet more than one proposition at the pump, dead-eyed, unshaven drifters looking for a good time away from their tired, worn out wives. Girl could make good money, doing that - for a little while. Her neighbor Ruby did - taking in boarders, she'd call it. Marie could hear it, at night, in the next shack, the camp bed creaking and him making noises and Ruby telling him how much of a man he was, all encouraging-like, like talking to a dog, or a small child. She did pretty well by it until she got sick and lost what weight she had, hacking and coughing her way to an early grave. The dates on the cross over her coffin placed her just shy of thirty.

Marie wasn't going to let that be her. She'd had one or two boyfriends, just to pass the time, but they weren't more than boys and none of 'em ever seemed to want to amount to anything, their eyes fixed no further than payday. But she'd had a home, once, and a nice one, a farm out in Oklahoma with the prettiest little green shutters and a garden, and she'd get back to that, if she could. She didn't want to end up like Ruby, coughing out her lungs in a tar paper shack - and certainly not like her mother, fading away like the print on a cotton dress and looking longingly at the books on her shelf, which wasn't really a shelf at all but a couple of fruit crates her brother had tacked together. 

Louisa Atcheson had been a teacher, before she'd married Frank Atcheson - had been out in the world and known things and used a lot of fine words when she spoke to her children. Not a whole lot of call for that where they were now - the dust had seen to that, dribbling the farm away in slips and starts, under cracks in doors and the sashes of windows until all that fine prairie topsoil was gone, straight to Hades, and there wasn't much a man could do except let the bank foreclose on him and pack the family off to California, picking fruit for a pittance while his wife tried to shuffle her children through the rest of their schooling. (That sort of thing was hard, when you moved every season and the work was scarce and you needed the kids in the field to make the rent. Took six years, instead of four, but Marie finished high school.)

Anyway, by twenty-one Marie had seen enough of it, of fruit picking camps and Hoovervilles, and she wasn't having it. There was a poster, in town, recruiting for Lady Marines, and that sounded good, or as good as it got. A job that gave you three squares, your uniforms, a bit of pay, and a place to sleep? She hitched a ride to the recruiting office, giving her name and her high school transcripts, telling the officer a line about why she wanted to join the Marines. Then he was rubber stamping her application, and she was off, to boot camp and fights in bars and Sergeant Edward Jones, fishing her out of corners she'd fight out of if it was the last thing she did.

It wasn't that first fight but the next one where she'd kissed him - they were arguing about why he wouldn’t let her go home with another Marine, fighting about how she could defend herself, and she'd tugged him down by his tie and he'd been too stunned (or too polite) to say no. After that it...sort of became a regular thing - bit of company when they both got lonely. Just another kind of taking in boarders. He had a sweetness in him, Eddie Jones - a poet’s eye to pretty things, her mother might have said.

“You got pretty eyes,” he said, once, brushing a hair out of her face in a cheap San Francisco hotel room. He wasn’t much for talking, especially after they’d had sex, but when he said things, he meant them, and it pulled her up short, this compliment that she hadn’t asked for.

“Bet you tell that to all the girls,” she’d said quickly, sitting up and shrugging back into her shirt.

“No, I mean it, Marie, they're...they're real nice. Like... storm clouds or something. Figured someone ought to tell you, sometime.”

Storm clouds. It was a pretty image - and one she’d hung on to, even after assignments and active duty had split them up and sent them on their separate ways. And here he was now, Edward Jones, back from the Canal, like half the town was - although he and the Captain here had bothered to wash and dress before going out on the town, unlike the rest of the raggedy-ass marines currently swarming over Melbourne.

“Andy, this here’s Sergeant Marie Atcheson - met out at Pendleton while I was stationed there. Marie, this is Captain Haldane, my...commanding officer.”

The way he said ‘Andy’ and paused at commanding officer tugged something in her - and the way he smiled afterwards moved something, too. “Was this the girl you were going on about once?” Haldane asked, looking at Eddie for more specifics.

Marie scowled at Eddie, silently hating him. This was just like old times, almost, the easy jokes and general friendliness. If they were back in Cali she knew where she’d take him, and what she’d like to let him do to her - and do to him in return. But it had been a long time since Pendleton - had he changed, any? Had she? “Whatever he’s told you isn’t true.”

But the Captain only snorted. “Why don’t I get us another round? Old friends and all that.”

They watched him leave, and Marie turned to Eddie looking for answers. She knew he went with fellows, sometimes, just like she knew there were girls in her outfit who slept together. It was just how these things were - if you got lonely, you took what you got. And looking at Eddie - really looking - she could see that his Captain and he were tied together, that kind of fondness you got from sharing everything with a person. Well, he had good taste - the Captain had some shoulders on him, a kind of compactness and strength, stockier where Eddie was tall and lean. (She liked him tall and lean - but a girl liked something to hang on to, on occasion, wrap her legs around and really possess.)

Eddie was side-eyeing her with a little smile on his lips. "Can’t say I blame you setting your cap at him - he is pretty cute."

"And he came in with you,” she added, just a little sour. Guess that was her plans for the evening gone. “You can pick 'em," she admitted with a smile. 

"Sure can," he said, giving her ass a little squeeze. 

She usually liked when he did that - but tonight it felt like pity, and she didn’t want it. “I’ll take the drink and go - don’t want to spoil your weekend. Don’t know if I’m good enough for an officer, anyway.”

“Now who said anything about spoiling?” He said, moving a little closer. “And you’re plenty good - for this officer or any other.”

His voice warmed her again - but she knew who’d he come with, what he probably wanted his evening to look like. “Ed, what’d you tell him?”

He pursed his lips a moment. “Well, sometimes at night, it got a little cold, and we just...swapped stories, for a while, after, you know, getting each other off. Girls we’d known, guys. Talked a fair piece about you. That you had a mouth on you, sometimes. That you liked a fight. That you were mighty pretty in your greens and you had the wildest pair of eyes - kind that would stare straight through your soul if you let ‘em - or put a little wood on you if you didn’t.” She turned around, a little, trying to puzzle out how she felt about being described that way. ”He liked the sound of that,” Eddie reported. “Think you might be getting to him now, as it happens. He played football, in college, you know, out east,” he offered, the two of them watching him wait for the bartender for their beers. “He knows how to hold on.”

There was that feeling again, making an observation of him. This was really doing things to her, having Eddie at her shoulder while they both looked at the Captain across the room, one foot casually resting on the brass rail of the bar so they could admire the curve of his ass, very aware that Eddie’s hand was casually on her hip, like he’d come in with her instead of him. “Eddie Jones, quit telling me about what I can't have,” she said quietly. 

“Who says you can’t?” Eddie said, quiet-like. “Fellow likes to see someone he loves getting nice things, from time to time,” he suggested quietly. She turned and stared - but his face was serious, that quiet consideration he gave everything. “He likes girls, know that much. Wouldn’t ...much mind watching the two of you, if you wanted.” There was a slight crook in his smile that made her want to melt into him, and the thought of what he was suggesting was doing things to her. “We’ve got a room, noisy place that won’t ask questions. Plenty of time for everyone to get what they came for.”

The Captain was coming back with the drinks, three pints balanced in his hands, the beer within sloshing together. “You two look up to some mischief,” he said. “Something I ought to know about?”

Eddie looked at Marie one more time -  _ take it or leave it.  _ She considered, and sighed. _ Two handsome men and little old me? Oh, fine, twist my arm. _ “Marie was just saying how she’d like to catch up, more,” Eddie said, finally, his smile mirroring her own, a single finger stroking the inside of the Captain’s wrist, his other arm still draped around her waist. “Maybe somewhere we can hear each other think.”

The Captain smiled, and raised his glass, and Marie decided she liked him even more.


End file.
